In 1752 the company had a pathway blazed between the small fortified posts at Will's Creek (Cumberland), Maryland, and at Redstone Creek (Brownsville), Pennsylvania, which it had established in 1750; but it was finally merged in the Walpole Company (an organization in which Benjamin Franklin was interested), which in 1772 had received from the British government a grant of a large tract lying along the southern bank of the Ohio as far west as the mouth of the Scioto river.